What Lessons Can European Leaders Learn from Trump’s Victory?

The US presidential electoral campaign was characterised by the “Europeanisation” of the American politics – something that never happened before. Discarding some obvious differences between the American and European political domains, Bernie Sanders appeared a typical European social democrat, Hillary Clinton – a European pro-establishment centrist, and Donald Trump – a European anti-establishment radical right-wing populist. Trump’s rhetoric during the campaign was notorious for anti-immigrant and racist statements, so it was only natural that European right-wing politicians such as Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the former leader of Britain’s UKIP Nigel Farage or the president of Front National Marine Le Pen overwhelmingly supported Trump during his campaign.
Data from the exit polls published by the New York Times, which gives a sociological overview of Clinton’s and Trump’s voters, further proves the affinity between the electorates of Trump and the European far right. Whites prevail (58%) over people of other ethnic origins among Trump’s voters, as do men (53%) over women and Christians (58%) – over the faithful of other religions. Moreover, whites without a college degree (67%) and residents of small cities and villages (62%) particularly stand out among Trump’s voters. For his electorate, immigration and terrorism are more important issues (64% and 57% correspondingly) than foreign policy (34%) and even economy (42%).

This picture differs little from the electorates of the majority of European far right parties, but there are interesting differences as well. Academic works on the European far right have long noted the overrepresentation of the working class among their supporters, but this seems not to be the case with Trump’s electorate, as it is almost evenly distributed over different income-based social categories. However, another important factor, again, brings Trump’s electorate close to that of the European radical right-wing populist parties: economic insecurity.

While major scholars of the far right do not consider economic conditions as the main driver for far right support, it is important to take into account not the economic situation in a given country as such, but rather its perception by the population and their views of the future. The vast majority of Trump’s supporters (63%) believe that life will be worse for the future generation of the citizens of the country, and this particular view is prevalent among the electorates of the European far right too.

This is also where lessons for the European leaders begin. Despite the relatively stable – especially if compared to other regions of the world – economic conditions in Europe or, at the very least, the strengthening economic recovery and improvement of labour market conditions, in most European countries citizens are pessimistic about the future. Older people generally believe that their children will be worse off, younger people think the same about themselves compared to their parents. According to the 2014 Pew Research Center survey, as many as 56% of the respondents in Germany, the largest economy in Europe, said that the next generations would be worse off; the figures for the UK and France, the second and third largest European economies, were 72% and 86% correspondingly. The same survey suggests that Europe and the US are equally the most pessimistic regions in the world.

When European mainstream political leaders say that economies are recovering after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, which is true, these words are no longer sufficient for the majority of the population across Europe. The most arrogant establishment figures may even ask: “Our economy is doing great, why are you unhappy?”. They seem to fail to realise that the global financial crisis dramatically undermined economic optimism of European societies, but coupled with the declining trust towards the political elites, general European pessimism may result in a political catastrophe.

The far right are well positioned to exploit the pessimistic perceptions of economic security, and are able to appeal to publics across generations. Younger people are the least attached to the political establishment, so the anti-elite rhetoric of the far right (and, obviously, the far left) may gain further traction with them. Older people, who are more conservative, may abandon their established political affiliations and increasingly follow the far right in believing that the ills of modern Europe are underpinned by globalisation, multiculturalism, immigration, individualism and liberalism, and therefore adopting a belief that the only “way out” is a truly conservative return to the utopian old days: a homogenous nation state, isolationism, low or no immigration, law and order, patriarchal society, etc.

Trump’s victory in the US, as well as the Pyrrhic triumph of the Leave campaign at the Brexit referendum in the UK, conveys yet another message to European leaders: identity politics has become one of the most important issues for the American and European societies, and cannot be ignored by established politicians any further. According to Eurobarometer, immigration was seen in 2015 as the most important issue facing the EU; moreover, immigration and terrorism (most important problems in the eyes of Trump’s supporters) were the only significant issues the salience of which had increased for Europeans in comparison to 2014.

Ethnic and cultural identity issues, when raised by members of European majorities, were frowned upon for several decades as there was a social consensus that raising these issues amounted to xenophobia and racism. In different European societies, this consensus either no longer exists or is crumbling fast – a development that many European leaders still fail to comprehend. By shying away from discussing openly difficult questions about ethnicity, culture and religion, mainstream European politicians have surrendered a broad political field to the far right to exploit in the most efficient and, indeed, authoritarian and illiberal way.

Another problem is that when some mainstream politicians do try to talk about these issues, they adopt the language of the far right, rather than developing a new liberal-democratic language about ethnicity and culture taking into consideration that the old liberal-democratic narratives about identity politics have largely lost their moral authority among many Europeans. Liberal-democratic leaders need to re-engage with social reality, but while taking identity politics seriously, they need to thread a fine line between far right, far left and old liberal-democratic conceptions. It may be extremely difficult but anything less will eventually lead European liberal democracy to defeat. For European societies, the issues of immigration, culture and religion have deeper political significance than these phenomena as such: these are questions about what constitutes demos (people) in modern demokratia (rule of people). Without re-identifying this notion, without re-establishing clear-cut boundaries between those who are part of demos and who are not, one cannot expect revival of political trust towards the rulers.

Finally, Trump’s victory tells European leaders that political establishment can no longer take its power for granted. Anti-establishment populist rhetoric is powerful, and politicians who employ this rhetoric not only can cause headache for the ruling elites but can actually prevail over them through the normal electoral process. As the election of Trump has shown, all the psychological barriers preventing people from voting en masse for those who adopt the language of hate have been erased.

There is a huge popular demand for new political agendas in Europe. The Austrian presidential elections in 2016 provides a good example for this trend: for the first time in the Austrian post-war history, neither a representative of the social-democratic party nor that of the conservative party – these parties were the strongest in Austria for decades – made it to the second round of the presidential election. Instead, the second round saw Alexander Van der Bellen backed by the Greens and the far right politician Norbert Hofer compete for the presidential post. Their success indicates a growing social demand for non-establishment new politics.

Despite Trump’s vicious anti-establishment statements during the electoral campaign, he is the establishment’s own flesh and blood, but European far right politicians are not. Their rise to power will be a disaster for Europe and will most likely dismantle the institutions that allowed European nations to co-exist peacefully for several decades and to become a shining example of the economic, political and cultural advantages of liberal-democratic order for the entire world.

But the quite feasible rise to power of the European far right can happen not because radical right-wing populists are strong, but because too many European mainstream leaders ignore the fact that socio-political environments are changing fast and, thus, fail to adapt to the new conditions by developing a new logic of communication with citizens, elaborating new powerful ideas about the future of Europe, and tackling the root causes of economic, political and cultural insecurity.

Anton Shekhovtsov is Visiting Fellow at the IWM and Fellow of the Legatum Institute (UK). He is also General Editor of Explorations of the Far Right book series at ibidem-Verlag.

or share:

Related Content

The Reichstag fire shows how quickly a modern republic can be transformed into an authoritarian regime. There is nothing new, to be sure, in the politics of exception. The American Founding Fathers knew that the democracy they were creating was vulnerable to an aspiring tyrant who might seize upon some dramatic event as grounds for the suspension of our rights. As James Madison nicely put it, tyranny arises “on some favorable emergency.” What changed with the Reichstag fire was the use of terrorism as a catalyst for regime change. To this day, we do not know who set the Reichstag fire: the lone anarchist executed by the Nazis or, as new scholarship by Benjamin Hett suggests, the Nazis themselves. What we do know is that it created the occasion for a leader to eliminate all opposition.Read more

Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.Read more

Following the initial shock of Donald J. Trump’s victory, both friends and foes will downgrade the significance of what has transpired. The same people who portrayed a Trump victory as apocalyptic will come to see it as business as usual. The risk is that, this time, we’re not returning to business as usual.Read more

To whatever extent we may be tempted to call the current threat fascism, it must be acknowledged that we no longer live in the world of 1930s Europe. This, instead, would be a fascism born of a bourgeois fantasy of enduring domination, given shape, for example, as the American dream - white, Christian, heteronormative, masculine.Read more

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. There is a vacancy on the Supreme Court. The country is at war abroad and has been in a state of mobilization for fifteen years. This means not only that Trump will be able to move fast but also that he will become accustomed to an unusually high level of political support. He will want to maintain and increase it—his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin—and the way to achieve that is through mobilization. There will be more wars, abroad and at home.Read more

I don’t know whether the Kremlin even has a favorite in the U.S. elections, but I do know what Russia’s ruling politicians love to watch. They love seeing others get caught in what one might call a “Russian trap”: when others are caught doing the very thing they accuse Moscow of doing. They enjoy watching those who accuse Moscow of calling its opponents “foreign agents” do the same to their own political opponents.Read more

Imagine that your teenage child has built a bomb and has just set it off in your house. The house is falling down all around you—and you are blaming the neighbor’s kid, who threw a pebble at your window. That’s what the recent Putin fixation is like—a way to evade the fact that Trump is a thoroughly American creation that poses an existential threat to American democracy.Read more

In comparing themselves with Europe, Americans prided themselves on the fact that “It can’t happen here” — namely, European socialism and European fascism. It viewed itself as immune to the pathologies of democracy: Crowds can go crazy in any other place in the world, but not in America, the land of common sense. But after the last years of extreme polarization and dysfunctional governance, are Americans still convinced that their democracy cannot be upended?Read more

Mr. Putin’s predilection for Mr. Trump has nothing to do with the Kremlin’s traditional preference for Republicans. It also can’t be explained by the fact that had Mr. Putin — a physically sound, aging, gun-loving and anti-gay conservative — been an American citizen, he would have fit the profile of a Trump supporter. Rather, Mr. Putin’s puzzling enthusiasm for Mr. Trump is rooted in the fact that they both live in a soap-opera world run by emotions rather than interests. Read more

Karl Aiginger is Director of WIFO (Österreichisches Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung), Professor of Economics and Coordinator of the project A new growth path for Europe within the 7th European Framework Program. Print

Rainer Bauböck is professor of social and political theory at the European University Institute in Florence. In 2006 he was awarded the Latsis Prize of the European Science Foundation for his work on immigration and social cohesion in modern societies. Among his many publications are Immigration and Boundaries of Citizenship (1992), Transnational Citizenship: Membership and …Read more

Mischa Gabowitsch (gabowitsch.net) is a research fellow at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. He is the author of Putin kaputt!? (Suhrkamp, 2013), a study of the 2011-13 Russian protests for fair elections, and maintains protestrussia.net, which collects academic resources for the study of protest in Russia. Print

Charles Gati is Senior Acting Director of Russian and Eurasian Studies and Foreign Policy Institute Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, Washington, D.C. Print

Miklós Haraszti is a writer, journalist, human rights advocate and university professor. He served the maximum of two terms as the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media from 2004 to 2010. Currently he is Adjunct Professor at the School of International and Public Affairs of Columbia Law School, New York. Haraszti studied philosophy and …Read more

Jennifer L. Hochschild is Professor of Government at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Professor of African and African-American Studies at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University. Print

Bruce P. Jackson is the founder and President of the Project on Transitional Democracies. The Project is a multi-year endeavour aimed at accelerating the pace of reform in post-1989 democracies and advancing the date for the integration of these democracies into the institutions of the Euro-Atlantic. Jackson has written extensively about the engagement of Russia …Read more

János Kornai is Prof. em. for Economics at Harvard University and Permanent Fellow at the Collegium Budapest – Institute for Advanced Study. He is a member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and the Academia Europeae, and Foreign Member of the American, British, Bulgarian, Finnish, Russian and Swedish Academies. He has served as President of …Read more

Alessandro Monsutti is an associate professor of anthropology and development sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva, as well as research associate at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He worked as a consultant for several nongovernmental and international organizations, icnluding UNHCR. His book War and Migration: Social Networks …Read more

Katherine S. Newman is the James B. Knapp Dean of The Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences. She is a widely published expert on poverty and the working poor who led major interdisciplinary initiatives at Princeton and Harvard universities. Print

Thomas Nowotny teaches Political Science at the University of Vienna. He has been Austrian diplomat, private secretary to Austrian Chancellor Bruno Kreisky, senior political counselor to the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and consultant to the OECD. Print

Irina Papkova is a Research Fellow of Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. She spent five years teaching at the Department of International Relations and European Studies at Central European University, Budapest. Print

Akos Rona-Tas is professor at the Sociology Department of the University of California, San Diego and a research associate at Met@risk, INRA, Paris. He is the author of the books Plastic Money: Constructing Markets for Credit Cards in Eight Postcommunist Countries (with Alya Guseva, 2014) and Surprise of the Small Transformation: Demise of Communism and …Read more

Paul Sanders is a historian and management scholar. He is a full-time professor at Reims Management School in Reims, France. He has published across the disciplines of history, international relations and leadership. Print

Thomas Schmid is the publisher of the WELT Group, Berlin. He worked for various newspapers, among them as editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung. From 2006 to 2010 he was Editor-in-Chief of Die Welt. Print

Margit Schratzenstaller is senior researcher at the Austrian Institute of Economic Research (WIFO) and is currently coordinating (together with Karl Aiginger and Stefan Ederer) ‘WWW for Europe’, a 4-year research project within the 7th Framework Program funded by the European Commission. Print

George Soros is a pioneer of the hedge-fund industry, investor and philanthropist, he is the author of many books, including Financial Turmoil in Europe and the United States: Essays (2012), The Soros Lectures: At the Central European University (2010), The Crash of 2008 and What it Means: The New Paradigm for Finance Markets (2009). …Read more

Roman Szporluk is Professor em. of Ukrainian History at Harvard and Professor em. of History at the University of Michigan. He is a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences in Kiev, Ukraine. His research focuses on modern Ukrainian, Russian, and Polish history, and on Marxism and nationalism in Eastern Europe. Print

Balázs Trencsényi, Ph.D., is Associate Professor at the Department of History, CEU. His research focuses on the comparative history of political thought in East Central Europe and the history of historiography. He is co-director of Pasts, Inc., Center for Historical Studies at CEU and Associate Editor of the periodical East Central Europe (Brill). He was …Read more

David G. Victor is a Professor at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, where he directs the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation. Print

Volodymyr Yermolenko is a Ukrainian philosopher and essayist. He has a degree in Political Science from the EHESS, Paris, and teaches at Kyiv Mohyla Academy in Kyiv. He is the author of the book Narrator and Philosopher: Walter Benjamin and his time (2011, in Ukrainian). Print